A couple of months ago, I upgraded an old PowerPC machine from OpenBSD 4.2 to 4.3, and I discovered that the new version of pfctl in 4.3 would segfault when reading my old pf.conf file. Some brief poking around with GDB revealed the root of the problem, an uninitialized variable in the new configuration file parser.

If you’ve been bitten by this as well, here’s a patch with the minor change that solved the problem for me:

--- sbin/pfctl/parse.y  Sat Feb 23 15:31:08 2008
+++ sbin/pfctl/parse.y  Thu May 15 08:55:38 2008
@@ -3487,9 +3487,11 @@
qname          : QUEUE STRING                          {
$$.qname = $2;
+                       $$.pqname = NULL;
}
| QUEUE '(' STRING ')'                  {
$$.qname = $3;
+                       $$.pqname = NULL;
}
| QUEUE '(' STRING comma STRING ')'     {
$$.qname = $3;

To apply this patch, perform the following (assuming that you have the OpenBSD 4.3 source code tree at /usr/src on your system):

# cd /usr/src
# patch -p0 </path/to/above/patch
# cd sbin/pfctl
# make && make install

My ISP blocks outbound SMTP traffic, unfortunately, and I didn’t feel like setting up Sendmail relaying just so I could submit a sendbug report, so I couldn’t open a ticket for the bug. I did send this patch to the bugs@ mailing list, but it was unable to generate any interest there; if someone stumbles across this who has a functional sendbug on their system, I’d be grateful if you could submit this patch in a proper bug report.

The segmentation fault doesn’t occur on the i386 port of OpenBSD (as far as I can tell), nor does it occur on the macppc port unless you use the “queue ( qname, pqname )” ALTQ syntax, so it’s easy to see why the hordes aren’t exactly beating down the OpenBSD folks’ doors about this one. So I figured I should post this here, where people might find it, until someone gets around to committing an official fix.